Chapter 13. Transaction Management

This chapter presents a brief overview of the main configuration options for the JBoss Transaction Service. For more information, please refer to the JBoss Transactions Administration Guide.

13.1. Overview

Transaction support in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is provided by JBoss Transaction Service, a mature, modular,standards based, highly configurable transaction manager. By default, the server runs with the local-only JTA module of JBoss Transaction Service installed. This module provides an implementation of the standard JTA API for use by other internal components, such as the EJB container, as well as direct use by applications. It is suitable for coordinating ACID transactions that involve one or more XA Resource managers, such as relational databases or message queues.
Two additional, optional, JBoss Transaction Service transaction modules are also shipped with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and may be deployed to provide additional functionality if required.
JBoss Transaction Service JTS
A Transaction Manager capable of distributing transaction context on remote IIOP method calls, creating a single distributed transaction which spans multiple Java Virtual Machines. This is useful for large-scale applications that span multiple servers, or for standards based interoperability with transactional business logic running in CORBA based systems. The functionality of this module can be accessed through the standard JTA API. In this way, it is a drop-in replacement and does not require changes to transactional business logic. To enable it, refer to Section 13.8, “Using the JTS Module” for more information.
JBoss Transaction Service XTS
A Transaction Manager, based on XML, which implements the WS-AtomicTransaction (WS-AT) and WS-BusinessActivity (WS-BA) specifications. This additional module uses core transaction support provided by the JTA or JTS managers, along with web services functionality provided by JBossWS Native. It is deployed into the server as an application. Applications may use WS-AT to provide standards based, distributed ACID transactions in a manner similar to JTS but using a Web Services transport, instead of CORBA. The WS-BA implementation compliments this by providing an alternative, compensation-based transaction model, well suited to coordinating long-running, loosely coupled business processes. XTS also implements a WS-Coordination (WS-C) service which is usually accessed internally by the local WS-AT and WS-BA implementations. However, this WS-C service can also be used to provide remote coordination for WS-AT and WS-BA transactions created in other server instances or non-JBoss containers. Refer to the JBoss Transactions Web Services Programmer's Guide for more details. To enable XTS, refer to Section 13.9, “Using the XTS Module”.